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‘Labels should pay for therapy’ — the Kooks’ frontman on teen fame

The Noughties band behind hits like Naive have billions of streams, but immense success — and criticism — at a young age took its toll, says Luke Pritchard

Hugh Harris and Luke Pritchard of the Kooks, holding guitars on a rooftop.
Hugh Harris and Luke Pritchard of the Kooks
The Times

Back in the early 2000s, three teenage friends from BIMM music college in Brighton formed a band as an end-of-term project, writing the kind of songs teenage boys will write along the way. A year later, they were famous. That’s when the problems started.

“People love Jackie Big Tits,” says Luke Pritchard of the Kooks, defending a notoriously puerile early song that was named after a character in Sexy Beast. Jackie Big Tits is actually about the songwriter, svengali and Wombles creator Mike Batt, whose wife, Julianne White, played Jackie in the British comedy crime classic. When Pritchard was 16 and attending the Brit School in Croydon, Batt discovered Katie Melua, Pritchard’s then girlfriend and a fellow pupil. Batt signed her to his Dramatico label and co-wrote her biggest hits, which led to tension with Pritchard, who resented the way Batt appeared to be taking over his girlfriend’s life.

“Mike and I … we had friction,” Pritchard confirms. “Mike likes to be in control, I was an anxiety-ridden 16-year-old, and I wrote a song about it. But that was 24 years ago. Everything about my life has changed since then.”

We’re in Pritchard’s flat in Battersea, southwest London, where he lives with his musician wife, Ellie Rose, and their two young sons. The Kooks are back with a sunny album called Never/Know, and Pritchard, now 40, says he’s finally in a position to reflect on everything that happened.

After meeting at the Brit School, Pritchard, the guitarist Hugh Harris and the drummer Paul Garred moved en masse to BIMM, forming the Kooks in 2004 around a shared love of the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, but without any career plan beyond all buying hats so they looked like they were in a band. Three months later they were signed to Virgin Records, and by 2006 they were releasing melody-rich hits like Naive and Ooh La. Not long afterwards the Kooks’ debut album, Inside In/Inside Out, sold two million copies, Lily Allen and Mutya Buenya of Sugababes were covering their songs, and all indie credibility went out of the window. Kasabian dismissed the Kooks as “music for girls”.

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“Our biggest strength was melodic songs that could be translated into pop, which wasn’t typical of indie bands in the Noughties,” Pritchard says. “We got flak for it, which bothered me at the time. Now all these young kids, especially girls, are fans of our band, I think because of the sensitivity and melodic sensibility in the songs.”

Times have changed. Pop is no longer a dirty word, a good tune is something to be celebrated, almost half the Kooks’ audience are under 25 and Naive has nearly 750 million streams on Spotify. In the mid-Noughties, however, the Kooks got little respect.

“It was certainly a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’,” Pritchard says of sudden success. “You do have to be grateful for any opening, but I was young for my age, quite shy, very much an outsider who had no interest from girls. Suddenly I had a famous model girlfriend [Suki Waterhouse] and all this attention, and I didn’t have the mental strength to deal with it. I could have enjoyed it more if I’d been a bit calmer about everything.”

In 2006, not long after leaving school, the Kooks were invited by the Rolling Stones on to their world tour. In 2009 they were billed to support Oasis in Italy, but the Gallaghers had a huge fight the night before and split up.

UK Premiere Of Searchlight Pictures' "A Complete Unknown" At BFI Southbank, London
Pritchard and his wife, Ellie Rose
TIM P WHITBY/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY LIMITED

“That was the funny thing: we had all this support from older people,” Pritchard says. “Noel Gallagher loved the band. Even Liam said, ‘Your album’s all right, but Ooh La’s a tune.’ I met Mick Jagger, more than once. I saw Ronnie Wood playing along to Brown Sugar backstage because he had forgotten how it went. Ray Davies, Paul Weller, even Mark Knopfler liked our record, while the NME went from love to hate and our contemporary bands thought we were a bit cheesy. It was a strange time.”

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After that first album came out in 2006, the Kooks were on tour for the best part of a year. It meant Pritchard came home from playing with the Stones to move back in with his mum in Forest Hill, southeast London, having had no time to find a place of his own. Besides, he was only 19. “We left school, went straight out on the road, and then you come back and find it hard to relate to your old friends.” How does it work with girlfriends? “It doesn’t. At least not in my experience. When I was with Suki we barely saw each other.”

Waterhouse has since become a singer in her own right, also putting in a scene-stealing performance as the keyboardist of a warring Fleetwood Mac-like Seventies rock band in the Amazon series Daisy Jones & the Six. China Town, from the new album, is about her, and it doesn’t sound like the relationship was an entirely harmonious one. “Maybe someone will love you the way you love yourself,” one line goes. “Suki wanted to be a singer back then, but she wanted to be a lot of things,” Pritchard says of his model/singer/actress former girlfriend. “My wife suggested I write that song. She said it would be good to write about that time because I can do it now without the baggage I had then.”

By the Kooks’ third album, 2011’s Junk of the Heart, the cracks were beginning to show musically. “The first album did so well that by the second album I was very confident — overconfident,” Pritchard says. “Everybody wants the frontman who thinks he’s Liam Gallagher, but when you’re not Liam Gallagher it doesn’t actually work. We would pass a Kooks poster and someone had written ‘This is shit’ on it. We were seen as fair game. It’s called punching up, but now I worry that we’ll miss out on amazing new artists because they’re not going to want to put themselves in that arena.”

Pritchard credits Ellie Rose not just for inspiring the album, but for turning his life around. “She has completely flipped my perspective,” he says. “We met on [the exclusive dating app] Raya and I was sure she didn’t like me, but after a tumultuous first year we were into soulmate territory. She was very tough on me: she said I didn’t have the right not to be happy because I had a great life and didn’t realise it. I didn’t know how to behave, I think because I never had any male role models. I didn’t know how to be a man.”

It is often said that arrested development sets in the moment someone becomes famous, which in Pritchard’s case was 18. “And Hugh was only 16. In the sports world there is financial planning and therapy, but the music world has nothing like that. I know we all want it to be rock’n’roll but I’ve seen people kill themselves, whether through drugs or whatever, and we don’t need it any more.”

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How could it be done differently? “Having more of a balance. Let’s say the band has been on the road for a year. The label could pay for a two-week retreat afterwards: fresh fruit, therapy if you want it. You need role models, some sense of community. I don’t think I have the insight to figure it out, but we must reconsider the way these young kids who get signed are treated.”

Another, more personal revelation for Pritchard came through having children. “I was writing the record while my son was coming up to three,” he says. “It made me realise that I had all this time with my dad I never thought I had.”

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Not that much time. Pritchard’s father, Robert, who ran a fashion label called Mono, died when he was three. In the early Sixties he had been in a band called Bob Pritchard and the Echoes, which, in an odd father-son parallel, once supported the Stones.

“I asked [the Stones drummer] Charlie Watts if he remembered my dad and he replied, ‘I’ve played with a lot of bands, man,’” Pritchard says. “I sort of remember my dad playing in a pub. I remember his funeral, where some guy gave me a plectrum. He came back from a work trip one time and gave me a red truck and a banana milkshake, and to this day I’ll throw up if I eat a banana. It’s only recently that I’ve realised: I’ve been doing all this stuff to try and make a connection with my dad.”

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Appropriately enough Never/Know has more in common with the music of Bob Pritchard’s era than that of his son. Sunny Baby sounds like the harmony pop of the Turtles. Tough at the Top is a lot like the Police. Elsewhere the shadows of the Kinks and the Stones hang heavy, and like so many of the great Sixties records the album was recorded in a matter of days, for the most part live.

“That was the inspiration: to go back to the spirit of the debut and not overthink,” Pritchard says as we bring the interview to an end. “We’re so consumed with worry about the big stuff we can’t control, I realised it was time to enjoy the moment. It’s given me a lust for life.” Then he’s off to meet his wife and sons; a 40-year-old rock star who has (finally) grown up.

Never/Know by the Kooks (Virgin) is out now

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